But those star-studded influences aren’t what makes Warren Zevon a true gem. Themselves, Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Don Henley and Jackson Browne all find their touches somewhere on his self-titled record. After the failure of Wanted Dead or Alive, Zevon would return to session work, even touring regularly with the Everly Brothers. It wasn’t his first stint in the music business. But, regardless of whether its his real debut or not, this album, Warren Zevon, is perhaps where he really began to thrive. He would write and record several more albums, flirt with chart success for several years, and ultimately pass away in 2003 from a type of cancer, leaving behind twelve releases in all, the last of which – The Wind – won him two posthumous Grammys. Zevon would go on to make his stardom with 1978’s Excitable Boy, which entered the US Top Ten and went platinum. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images There are plenty of electric numbers here for fans of what would come later, and enough delicate arrangements to shake you to the core. He sympathizes with convicts, talks freely about drug use and sneers at the thought of death. Hauntingly poetic compositions like ‘Hasten Down the Wind’ or ‘Carmelita’ are what Zevon does best, and he wields the piano with all the emotion and understated ferocity of a forty-piece orchestra.įrom the flawless, gung-ho five-minute opener of the James brothers, ‘Frank and Jesse James’ to the apocalyptic ‘Desperados…’, it’s the ultimate tale of the Californian dream, a satirical bite-down at the society Zevon has witnessed up to this point. He’s a songwriter that knows when to pull at the heartstrings. Like Rolling Stone says, ‘ the last and grandest surrealistic joke on the album’.īut that’s not to say Warren Zevon is all funny twists and ironic endings, either. Even in the album’s closer, he sings that if California slides under the ocean’s waves, his hotel will still be standing until the bill is paid. His ability to compile the frustratingly real with the utterly zany is a trademark of his career. ‘Hasten Down the Wind’, ‘The French Inhaler, ‘Desperados Under the Eaves’, all are often cited as some of his most defining moments. (Photo by Henry Diltz/Corbis via Getty Images)īut really, it’s Zevon’s ballads here that prove timelessly beautiful, and haunting. Warren Zevon sitting by a spotlight, circa 1978.
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